1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to the arts of electronic web site technology, and especially to the art of providing web site content in multiple languages.
2. Description of the Related Art
As described in the related application, the use of the World Wide Web (“WWW”) has grown dramatically and is expected to continue to grow as more businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and private consumers become web users and web site owners. As this has swept through the US, across Europe, and throughout industrialized Asia, the problem of providing web site content in multiple languages has increased. It is expected that as more countries around the world improve their telephone systems in order to allow better voice and data communications, the multi-lingual requirement for successful web site deployment will further increase.
As shown in FIG. 2, the common method for providing multi-lingual content is actually to provide multiple web sites within a web site. For example, a company's home page (20) may be primarily written and designed in English, but it may have hyperlinks to select alternate languages such as Spanish, German and French. If a user selected the Spanish hyperlink (24), he or she would then be transmitted the Spanish-only home page which resides at the top of the Spanish portion of the site map. Hyperlinks within the Spanish home page would lead to more pages of Spanish-only content. The same is true for a French hyperlink (26) and a German hyperlink (25) from the English home page (20). The English home page, of course, contains many other hyperlinks (21) to the English-only pages (22).
One can view this organization of documents as 4 linked web sites, an English web site (23), a French web site (29), a German web site (28) and a Spanish web site (27). Since each page of content must be designed separately to account for language-specific content and layout, the cost and time involved to develop and maintain a 4-language web site can be seen as approximately 4 times the cost to develop and maintain a single-language web site. If the web site content is bulky, such as web sites which contain significant graphics and video content, the system storage requirements for a multi-lingual web site may also approximate the multiple of the languages for a single web site storage requirement.
As maintenance of pages as they change will require changes in 4 pages for every one content change to be made, the maintenance issue can be considerable. So much so that real-time updates in multiple languages, such as real-time inclusion of news articles or stock quotes, can be impractical.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a web server technology which enables multi-lingual web site content to be delivered to web browsers, but minimizes duplicate electronic content, allows for simultaneous maintenance actions, and provides a real-time capability to incorporate dynamic and changing information.